TASTEBUD
SO MUCH TO TASTE. SO LITTLE TIME.Archive for beer
A Toast To Thirst
This week’s New Yorker features an unexpected treat by staff writer Burkhard Bilger. Call it the Barack Obama of beer articles: a ten-page analysis of the craft beer industry—and one of its provocateurs, Sam Calagione, of Dogfish Head Brewery—that sucker punches conventional wisdom. There’s much to savor here, with passages such as the following:
“Calagione strapped on a pair of safety glasses and peered into the oak and hickory embers. “If there are no second-degree burns, I’ll call this a success,” he said. Then he heaved in a rock, sending up a shower of sparks. “Let me know if they start to explode,” he told one of the cooks.”
Bilger’s description of Calagione’s unorthodox brewing methods, including the use of Palo Santo (a rare, aromatic Uruguayan wood three times harder than oak) to ferment a burly stout is riveting—and brings back a lot of fond journalistic memories.
My oft-beer-writing-partner-in-crime Seth Fletcher and I wrote about Calagione’s use of Palo Santo in the October issue of Men’s Journal in which we named the resulting beer one of the best in America, only after tasting it with Calagione while huddled at the tiny copper-topped bar of Dieu De Ciel, a brewpub in Montreal’s Plateau district. We’d ventured up for the Mondiale Du La Biere Festival, and arranged to meet Calagione, well armed with samples—including the Palo Santo-aged beer. Another interesting passage for me was Bilger’s on-site interview with Brasserie D’Orval brewmaster Jean Marie Rock, who I met, too, in 1997 while in Belgium on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship doing research that would become the basis of my first published article, from the (now defunct) Brewing Techniques magazine (and an award-winner).
A toast to Burkhard, Sam, and beer drinkers everywhere who’ve been calling for full respect of the good stuff for a long time. I’ve got to sign off now, or I’ll be late for a tasting at Gramercy Tavern. On the menu? Beer, of course.
Reading For The (Self-Administered) Apocalypse
Everyone has a preferred hangover helper (mine’s a steaming hot spicy bowl of pho noodle soup, aspirin, and ‘Rushmore‘). Others go for hair-of-the-dog, spa treatments, cheeseburgers, or, hell, all three at once. But such methods fail, a story in today’s Times points out, to address symptoms beyond the usual nausea and exhaustion—the much worse ones based in existential darkness, self-loathing, and regret. To a certain sort, such side effects from revelry require more than folk remedies (see Joan Acocella’s recent gem in The New Yorker, A Few Too Many) they require a good long read. One that takes you to a deeper, more despondent place, in fact, so your return to personhood can be felt even more satisfyingly. Enter ‘EVERYDAY DRINKING: The Distilled Kingsley Amis’ (Bloomsbury). Three of his long out-of-print books on the art of drinking have been compiled into a single volume with the added kick of an introduction by another legendary prude, Christopher Hitchens. Here’s a few choice excerpts thanks to Dwight Garner’s review, the first on diets:
“The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.” On why serious drinkers should own a separate refrigerator for their implements: “Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.” On the benefits of sangria: “You can drink a lot of it without falling down.”
See you at the bar, friends.
EVERYDAY DRINKING
The Distilled Kingsley Amis
By Kingsley Amis
302 pages. Bloomsbury. $19.99.
Smith: Restaurant Row? More like Liquor Lane
With a name like “THE JAKEWALK”, there’s already good reason to look forward to the latest addition to Smith Street, fast becoming more a street for boozy haute cocktail-soaked pub crawls than leisurely dinners (though you can find me happily hiding out in with a minute steak in Bar Tabac often enough). But with the (coming-soon) Clover Club, the timeless Brooklyn Inn, Brooklyn Social, and winebar Black Mountain, I’m going to pronounce Smith Street Brooklyn’s favorite lane for drinking as well as eating. And hell, when you cast your gimlet-eyed gaze on the fair borough of Brooklyn as a whole, the arrivals of Weather Up, Beer Table, 4th Avenue Pub, Pacific Standard, Cherry Tree, Radegast, and so many more make for a rosy picture indeed.
Step Off, Umami! Moroyaka in da House [Flavor Wars, Part I]
[Flavor Wars - in which this blog takes a look at a misunderstood or underappreciated taste, and dissects it] As I sat at Sushi Yasuda today with a lovely friend, a strange smell suddenly enveloped the table. Actually it wasn’t a strange smell at all; it’s the same one one might get a whiff of, say, during a Willie Nelson concert. We looked at each other quizzically, then the waitress. It got us thinking: the sights and smells of Japanese food are often woefully misunderstood. (It was some sort of combo of the roasted green tea we drank, and possibly the seaweed. But the evidence disappeared in a hurry).Take umami. That elusive taste sensation was the word we searched for in vain as we demolished two plates of sushi and sashimi, the highlight of which was uni, or sea urchin roe. Lovers of uni—and I am a recent convert—form a sort of culinary secret society, one in which it wouldn’t be considered gluttonous to order 20 pieces of the stuff. Maybe it’s the limpid, tongue-like texture. Or the kabocha squash orange color. Or the cucumbery, briny, rich flavor that erupts with a bite of the best, freshest examples, which, in this country, come from about 30-90′ of Santa Barbara’s kelp forested seafloor. The LA Times staff writer Russ Parsons put it this way: “Sea urchins look like anything but a delicacy; they are covered with a spiny shell. But inside every urchin are five pieces of roe. Soft almost to the point of trembling, these melt on the tongue, releasing a vivid blast of pure ocean flavor. These are what are prized by sushi lovers.”But umami it is not, Mr. and Ms. Malaprop. Read the rest of this entry »
